Chapter One

“Boys don’t like funny girls.” That’s what my mother always used to tell me. I never understood her position, understood why it was so important to her that I refrain from being “funny.” She would tell me this as we giggled over my clumsiness with knitting needles or a sewing kit; these were the moments when we could exist together in laughter, anger, frustration, life. To this day, I wonder if men actually like funny women. I wonder if she was right all along.

This doesn’t matter now.

I should be glad that her eyes aren’t open. My sister, Laura, notices that her lipstick isn’t done correctly. The color they’ve put on her makes her look like a streetwalker, and she has already attempted to wipe it clean with the corner of her black blazer. She takes her own lipstick out of her purse and pushes it onto my mother’s smeared paper lips. Now she looks like she just finished fucking a nameless man in the back of a car straight out of American Graffiti. His name is Johnny. He wears leather jackets, and he took her out to “the point” for a little fun. Every film has “the point.”

Her lips are ruby red, and the entire area around her mouth is being rubbed to no avail by my sister’s dirty sleeve. I should be glad that her eyes aren’t open. I turn away from her, reclining in her last bed. My niece and nephew do not understand what has just happened. They peer over the top of her soap dish curiously, but mostly I see terror in their little bodies. The adults perform their own version of terror, enacted in poses of pathos. All I see are hunched shoulders, water drops falling, eyes fixed on the velvet-crushed ground.

I knew this was coming yet I can’t help but think that I am the only one here who is not shocked. The rigor mortis of grief has consumed everyone in this room. My grandfather sits alone in the corner mumbling. I want to join him, but my legs are as stiff as her lips. He sits with his head in his hands. Then it hits me: this is grief, what I should be feeling right now. Instead, all I can do is stand here and watch everyone else’s sadness play out before me.

I feel nothing.

In the last weeks before she died, I remember visiting her on her makeshift bed. She had elected to die quietly, rejecting chemotherapy as a way of prolonging her futile existence. The family left me alone with her, but I knew I didn’t have long. Her body had begun the process of decay that would have normally taken years. I watched her as she lay on her back; her eyes were clouded, seeing nothing. I allow myself to think that she could understand me at that moment, dreaming in widescreen as if tumors, doctors, and crying family members didn’t exist. I wonder if Johnny is with her now, wrapping her sweater around her, even though the night is warm and the fireflies are whispering to each other. Her eyes don’t move as she stares at the ceiling. If I watch her for a little while longer, maybe I’ll see something. Anything.

The room is silent except for her labored breathing, so light yet so fleeting. Laura calls to me from downstairs, instructing me to see if she needs to use the restroom. We have already placed a bedpan in her room, but I remember thinking that she may need to move to diapers soon. There is no one up here to help me. I pull down her pants. The healthy legs I remember from my youth have all but disappeared. Our days at the swimming pool together are long gone, and so is the fat that used to bunch near her inner thighs. Now I am the one with the extra fat to give, she would probably joke. She always wanted to be thinner, but probably not like this. I briefly wonder if she ever knew that the key to really losing pounds was to contract a deadly illness.

Her legs are shaking now. I can’t support her weight, and the right half of her body is careening towards the ground. I shift her weight awkwardly in my arms and wonder if someone else should be doing this job. As I turn my head towards her, I notice that her eyes have remained unchanged. They are still clouded, unseeing, unfeeling. We have finally moved a few steps, sidestepping awkwardly until we reach the bedpan. I help her artificially crouch; her eyes are still empty, and I wonder when this is going to end. It takes a little encouraging for her to expel, but now it’s done. We slide back with no grace. I pull her pants up, and she has no fight left in her.

Brain tumor. After a certain point it doesn’t mean much. It means decay, her body swaying as I struggle to move her to her place of defecation. Her limbs are at once limp and rigid, the body grasping to create an image that accurately reflects the damaged sites inside her brain. It is the way her breath shallowly shakes, wanting to make itself heard amongst all of the other aching cells inside her skin. There have been whispers. The family knew all along what was happening; they told me, but I never chose to listen because I was too caught up with life. This fact of life was never more self-evident than right now. It is the reality of waste, of decline, of defecation, of decay.

She is dying, and I can’t do anything to stop it. My vitality is not enough to push her collapsing corpse back to me. Life, at eighteen, takes precedence over death. But at this moment, death is the reality that I am facing. No, it is the reality that she is facing and has already acknowledged. Even in her last moments, she is still a stronger person than I will ever be. Her clouded eyes are not looking at me, but they’re seeing some other place that I can’t name. I’d like to think it’s heaven, but I know that God couldn’t possibly exist now. God has not had to see my mother’s shit.

I break down.

I am so sorry. I am so sorry that this is happening to you. It is too soon for me to lose you, and I don’t think that I will be able to survive without your guidance. Please don’t go yet. I need you; everyone is still counting on you, even though they shouldn’t. Stay with us. Live for yourself, but stay with us. I am sorry that I never did all of the things that you wanted me to do, never picked squash with you in the garden, never went to business school, never did any of that. Let’s do it over again. Give us another chance.

She looked at me. Her eyes cleared, and I realized that she could see me. It was the first time in weeks that she had had a moment of lucidity. Her noodle arm reached out and began shaking. Her balled up hand lands on top of mine, and we both stare at each other. She heard me, and this is all that matters. Her body struggles, but she keeps moving on, moving towards a goal that is nowhere in sight. For her, there is only the struggle.

That was the last time she was with me.

My family is taking a long time. Now that my mother’s hooker lipstick is complete, there is only crying. Her body looks ethereal; she must be sleeping. It seems as if she could jump out of her prison in a moment and shout “surprise!” We would all laugh, shake our heads, and go out for barbecue afterwards. This whole funeral ordeal was an elaborate prank to get us all to realize how much we appreciate her. She would look fabulous at the restaurant; she would laugh, giggle, and chastise my sister for putting such an intense lipstick color on her. My niece and nephew would hug her around her soft stomach. My grandfather would give her his last piece of meat, just to make sure she didn’t get too skinny. This is how it should happen.

I am waiting.

There is no surprise. Instead, all I can think of is her struggle. She struggled in life and death, but this is no surprise. The eternal struggle, it seems, is what her life ultimately amounted to; I would have wanted her to have an easier death, a more sudden death, a death that would not have drawn out the pain she endured. However, this way was more her. Life was not easy. Death should be no better. Her body was a cage of suffering that she was finally allowed to escape.

She is free.

I am here.

At least, I am funny.